Back to the Front (12 page)

God Will Know You, Dust of Heroes)

The road downhill leads to Souchez, a town in a hollow between Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy Ridge. Given its unfortunate
location between these two strategic Artesian heights, the town has a history of being obliterated. Its tourist office, grandly
called the European Peace Center, tries to encourage visitors to visit the hokey military museums of the area. From its panoramic
cafe, there's a supremely dismal view of the Double Crassier at Loos. Nowhere is there a mention that the small height above
Souchez was visited by Henri Barbusse, the author of one of France's enduring Great War novels. His enormously influential
Le Feu
{Under Fire),
published in 1916 and winner of the Prix Goncourt, described the sickening conditions of the fighting around Souchez. In his
forties when the conflict engulfed Europe, Barbusse volunteered in the hope of establishing a socialist millennium, then gained
recognition by being one of the first combatants to get his denunciation of the war's quotidian horror into print.

Before Barbusse's novel, many accounts of the war had still been caught up in the intoxicating myths of sacrifice and common
cause. Even the avant-garde toyed with militarism. The Futurists, led by Italian visionary Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had
trumpeted the virtues of war because they saw it as a way of sweeping away the old and bringing in a brave new machine age.
In 1915, the year Barbusse was in the hell of Souchez, critic and author Wyndham Lewis dismissed Marinetti and his voluble,
drum-pounding Futurist followers as "boomers."

"The future," says Bertrand the soldier in
Le Feu,
"the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out
like something abominable and shameful." In this passage, Barbusse unwittingly brings Futurist boomers and future Boomers
together. We of the future have wiped out the past—not because it's shameful, but because it's irrelevant.

I
GET BACK
in the car and head south. To my left is the gentle slope leading up to Vimy Ridge. The Canadian tuning fork peeks
over the pines. I know what a weird landscape the trees are hiding. Ahead of me the highway rises slightly, to a crest where
the city of Arras can be seen in the distance. At this vantage point the road threads its way between a monument to Czech
volunteers and a memorial to Polish soldiers. The route out of Souchez is thus yet another unheralded and unlikely international
meeting place, like the Indian-Portuguese complex at Neuve Chapelle. On this road, however, the cosmopolitanism goes a few
steps further. It is here that several important sequences of another French language war classic,
La Main Coupee
(
The Severed Hand),
take place. The author, Blaise Cendrars, a Futurist poet of Swiss-Scottish parentage who was destined to become a one-armed
French literary gadfly after the war, tells of attacking Vimy Ridge in 1915 at the head of a contingent of Moroccan Zouaves.
It's as if this stretch of road has killed someone from every nation.

La Targette and Neuville St. Vaast flash into view. I know this stretch of road. I see myself, nine years earlier, coming
out of the German cemetery, notebook in hand, backpack askew, the sheep droppings of Vimy still clinging to my boots. I hit
the accelerator. It's time to leave this sad corner of Artois and rejoin my former self as I walk into Arras.

5
.
Arras to Hebuterne

Arras is a town of chimeras, an optical illusion. After the dead desert of Neuville St. Vaast and La Targette, it appears
as an oasis, an outpost of ambiguity in a plain that tolerates none. The pride of the city are two enormous squares bordered
by pale pink seventeenth- and eighteenth-century townhouses, the gables of their uppermost stories pierced by baroque oeil-de-boeuf
holes, as if to let in the moonlight. The larger of the two squares, called the Grand'Place, stretches out before me like
a darkened dreamscape. The long arcades at street level — the houses are supported by graceful sandstone columns—echo with
the footfalls of people unseen, wraiths slipping quietly through the inky night. I join the stealthy parade around the old
square, staying clear of the blue cobbled sea in the center. Headlights of passing cars pick out the columns ahead of me,
the black ranks of their shadows pivoting away from the intrusive beams. Then the light is gone, and all is much blacker than
before.

What do I know about Arras? I'm only just convinced that it exists. It used to be no more than a word, a Trivial Pursuit nugget
of knowledge from Shakespeare. In
Hamlet,
Polonius unwisely hides behind an arras—and gets stabbed by his would-be son-in-law. Arras: a wall hanging, a place of concealment.
Italians, a brochure informs me, call tapestries
arazzi.
The city's most famous son was known, by those too frightened to call him by name, as the
avocat d'Arras
(lawyer from Arras). Maximilien de Robespierre sharpened his merciless intellect in the literary salons of the Grand'Place,
one of which hid its provincial origins under the moniker of Rosati, an anagram for Artois. Concealment, once again.

The municipal museum, bursting with civic pride about every conceivable hiccup of Arrageois history, hardly mentions Robespierre.
Although the good burghers of the city seem slightly less baise-beige than their counterparts in Bethune, they must be embarrassed
about their incorruptible offspring. My less inhibited guidebook leads me down a street past the inevitable belfry of the
city hall. I stand in front of a decrepit old house and search for a marker, a sign, a plaque. I study the map, unsure of
where I am. A concierge comes out of a doorway, sweeps a few microbes off her stoop, looks at me, then nods. I've got the
right place. Maximilien used to live here, but he's since moved to Paris.

Arras: a secretive place, a facade for mayhem. It was in the Arras train station one night in 1872 that Paul Verlaine and
Arthur Rimbaud got arrested for drunkenly pretending to be murderers and terrifying a crowd in the waiting room. Arras: a
city where poets are feared. Below the city, hollowed out of the porous rock, there are miles of tunnels and interconnected
chambers. In the four years of the Great War, entire battalions of the British Army took shelter from the shells crashing
along this part of the Front. They hid out, like Polonius, screened by Arras. Just as the city hides itself. Years after first
visiting Arras, I come across a Michelin 1919 guide in the same series as my guide to Ypres. I stare at the pictures in disbelief.
I've been conned. The lovely old city that I had so admired, its squares and townhouses and bell tower—all is rubble or ruin.
The old Arras of today is a mirage. Arras: a sleight of hand performed by French craftsmen.

A parting word on the capital of Artois from Siegfried Sassoon's "The General." The poem has two privates passing an officer
on their way to the city. Aside from showing the prepositional discretion of a Brit—"did for them" means "had them killed"
— Sassoon conveys the matter-of-fact bitterness of Great War veterans:

'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them all with his plan of attack.

Arras: a place to pass through. Quickly.

S
OUTH OF THE
city, in the last stretch of the Artesian uplands, the countryside opens up, its aspect changing as a series
of gentle ridges leads the way to the woodlands of Picardy. Slag heaps give way to hayricks, grimy corons to sugar beet silos.
There is not a hedge in sight; the landscape folds and rolls under a warm sun, as golden as a flame. Steeples pop up in distant
villages. Ransart, Blairville, Adinfer, Douchy. I am beginning to enter France as it is imagined by outsiders, the hawkers
of the image of a rural Arcadia, an uncomplicated land of aperitif drinkers falling off their bicycles and scented women surrendering
beneath poplar trees. The settings may change slightly—the poplars may turn to
platanes
and the chablis become pastis—but the myth remains the same. I half expect a
deux chevaux,
a snail-shaped Citroen love bug, to rattle past in the morning light, trailing a zephyr of accordion music.

The power of received ideas is so strong that sometimes one forgets that they had to originate somewhere. Peter Mayle strung
together a charming chain of cliches in his books on Provence—but whence did such caricatures arise? How did they become so
widespread as to be recognized by millions? Notwithstanding nuclear tests in the Pacific and fairly regular riots in the suburbs,
France can still be sold to outsiders as a rural pleasure dome. Perhaps it is because so many young men — British, American,
German—spent the most dramatic days of their lives in France, fighting in one of the world wars, that the country became synonymous
with heightened experience, with irresponsibility, with sexual coming of age. Whether France remains thus, as these veterans
disappear, is doubtful.

The Great War was, as a Schwarzkopf or Saddam might put it, the mother of all bullshit. Received ideas were manufactured.
France and Belgium, the reluctant hosts to the Western Front, became the scene of millions of now forgotten falsehoods, either
spun deliberately by the military and the governments and their press, or created by fantasts sitting idly in their trenches.
The First World War can be said to have ushered in the industrialization of the lie. In a memorable passage from
Voyage au bout de la nuit {Journey to the End of the Night),
Louis Ferdinand Celine has his narrator describe the tenor of wartime life in the city:

Lie, copulate and die. One wasn't allowed to do anything else. People lied fiercely and beyond belief, ridiculously, beyond
the limits of absurdity: lies in the papers, lies on the hoardings, lies on foot, on horseback and on wheels. Everybody was
doing it, trying to see who could produce a more fantastic lie than his neighbor. There was soon no truth left in town.

The French called the flood of lies
le bourrage de crdne
(skull cramming). German papers told of how the French had dumped typhus into the water supplies of Frankfurt. French papers
explained how German corpses smelled fouler than French ones. Trench life was lauded as a walk in the country—French illustrators
took pains to show the billiard rooms and refreshment centers supposedly built into every dugout. There was talk of "Turpin
Powder," a mysterious substance that when applied liberally would protect against poison gas and shrapnel. In a time when
the truth was obscene, the wellspring of rumor never ran dry. One of the most famous tales concerned celestial intercession
on the English side during the battle of Mons in 1914. Wrathful archers appeared in the sky above the battlefield and loosed
their arrows against the Germans. The so-called Angel of Mons survived all debunkers, even when it was pointed out that the
heavenly archer originated in a story published on September 29, 1914, by one Arthur Machen, member of the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn. His war fable, entitled "The Bowmen," encapsulated the middle-class metaphysic of late Victorian society
and, like any good story whose time has come, was spread by word of mouth until it became established fact. Throughout the
war, reports of German soldiers found dead of arrow wounds in no-man's-land were regularly given credence. The Angel of Mons
was wartime Britain's equivalent of midwestern America's vanishing hitchhiker.

Most rumors were innocuous. In the winter of 1914, many Englishmen believed that more than a million Russian soldiers, recognizable
from telltale snow on their boots, had been spirited from Scotland to the Channel ports in the dead of night. Even the most
intellectually gifted believed this preposterous bit of wishful thinking: Bertrand Russell noted their passage in his diary.
Other tales had more chilling effects. Of all the spectacular stories of German atrocities — a favorite was the Belgian priest
tied up and used as a human clapper in a large church bell — few were more pernicious than the so-called crucified Canadian.
An unfortunate sergeant was supposedly found out in no-man's-land, horribly nailed to a tree, or a wagon wheel, or whatever.
That appalling story spurred Canadians to be the most sadistic fighters of the war, known for torturing and massacring prisoners.
Or so rumor has it.

Fortunately, only the countryside deceives about the war now. What appeared to be lovely old churches in a French Arcadia
loom up as brick and concrete monstrosities, topped by witch's hat steeples. The Front has been here. Outside the village
of Ayette, a narrow country lane suitable for trysts turns out to be the driveway of a graveyard. There, worlds away from
home, dozens of Chinese laborers lie buried, their British-issue headstones etched with aphorisms. "A Good Reputation Endures
For Ever" is the most common.

The final few miles to Gommecourt and Hebuterne pass without incident. As I walk along a sunken road in the late afternoon,
a group of inquisitive cows comes over to greet me, as if expecting me to moo them a story. I put my hand on the wire fence
and instantly regret it—a shock runs through me. I walk on, facing down the occasional dog that bounds toward me for a brief
spell of mammal communion. I'm reminded of my first steps into Artois. Here, along a road leading to Hebuterne, I have reached
the end of one province. Tomorrow, I'll head south into Picardy, the Somme, and 1916.